An economy can diversify its energy suppliers and still concentrate its vulnerability. The decisive question is not how many alternatives exist, but whether they remain usable when the first line of defence fails.
The US Energy Information Administration’s September outlook reports that attacks affecting Saudi exports through Bab el-Mandeb reduced shipments from Yanbu—the Red Sea outlet that bypasses Hormuz. A route can escape one chokepoint without escaping the conflict. Procurement diversity is not necessarily risk diversity. India should turn this distinction into policy: test whether critical safeguards can fail together.
Consider a hypothetical cyclone affecting a terminal, its electricity supply and access roads. An alternative berth, standby generator and contracted emergency team may each appear available in separate plans. Yet the same event could disable or isolate all three. Individual readiness would conceal collective dependence.
This is not an argument against interconnected infrastructure. It is an argument for securing the dependencies that conventional asset-by-asset assessments can miss.
The September issue of ENERGDIVE brings this into sharp focus. BPCL’s Chandrasekhar N explains that processing varied crudes places additional demands on catalysts and their operating windows. A replacement cargo available commercially is therefore not automatically interchangeable operationally.
In electricity, the Central Electricity Authority’s August report examines wear, maintenance and plant-life implications of flexible thermal operation. Flexibility must be assessed against equipment condition and operating limits, not treated as an inexhaustible balancing resource.
For industrial electrification, the implication is clear: emissions gains must be assessed alongside grid dependencies. The supply contract, network configuration and safe shutdown arrangements belong in one evaluation. Moving an energy function outside a factory does not remove the factory’s dependence on it.
Safety research adds another dimension. The US Chemical Safety Board’s August report on the 2025 Clairton explosion describes occupied buildings, including control rooms, located above hazardous gas piping without blast-resistant construction. The same event struck the process and its control-room occupants. The means of intervention must be protected from the event they are intended to manage.
India should launch a twelve-month Energy Continuity Stress Test, piloting a refinery–port cluster, a renewable-heavy industrial corridor and a metropolitan utility area. The Cabinet Secretariat could commission the exercise through existing Centre–state mechanisms, bringing operators, regulators, emergency agencies and insurers together. The programme should build on CEA’s resource-adequacy planning and existing emergency arrangements, without adding permissions.
Start with confidential maps of shared dependencies: fuel routes, substations, digital controls, cooling water, specialist crews and critical spares. Ask whether apparently separate alternatives rely on the same enabling infrastructure.
Then simulate credible disruptions and rehearse decisions without endangering live operations. Measure essential demand sustained, time to safe recovery and reserves actually usable. Resources promised simultaneously to several users must not be counted repeatedly. Continuity achieved by overriding safety limits must never qualify as success.
Publish methodologies and aggregate findings; protect sensitive asset-level information. Assign corrective actions, deadlines and accountable owners. A physically separate feeder or a pre-agreed salvage contract may prove more valuable than another asset exposed to the same failure.
“India should launch a twelve-month Energy Continuity Stress Test, piloting a refinery–port cluster, a renewable-heavy industrial corridor and a metropolitan utility area”
The test must influence investment, not merely produce reports. Procurement should reward verified protection against shared failures, not simply additional capacity. Competitive availability contracts could support essential capabilities that cannot survive on irregular emergency call-outs. Payments should buy tested service obligations, not simply ownership of equipment.
Our oil-spill analysis identifies precisely this difficulty: salvage requires equipment, trained crews, contractual clarity and financing before an incident. The commercial model must support that public function.
Diplomacy should apply the same discipline. Reciprocal arrangements for emergency berthing, repairs, specialist assistance and critical spares should establish who can deliver during a regional disruption. Partners sharing the same exposure cannot automatically be counted as independent protection.
This is not a prescription for unlimited redundancy. It is a method for identifying which expenditure genuinely reduces national exposure—and which merely duplicates it.
India’s next competitive advantage could be the ability to demonstrate that factories, fuel systems and essential services can continue safely under stress. Such evidence would give investors a stronger basis for confidence and citizens greater protection from disruptions they cannot reasonably manage themselves.
The strongest energy system is not the one with the longest list of backups. It is the one whose backups do not fail together.
The author is Director General, The Energy & Climate Initiatives Society (ENCIS). The views expressed are his own.
